Victim becomes executioner, adept becomes teacher, receiver becomes donor, son becomes father: is it really only in this way that they all can overcome their former situation and get some grasp on themselves? And is it in this sense that we must try to understand the mentioned statement by Bradatan? The characters in the divine novel that, in their turn, start to create and, in doing so, succeed in finding the solace they were waiting for?
It looks as if the different actors in the happenings that follow each other and that we call history are predestined to interchange their positions and to do so in a very particular direction that seems to be as determined as is the direction of time.
The human being does not seem to be pleased with his own individual existence: man wants to experience and to enquire. The foreign and the frightening attracts him and he tends to come as close as is possible to it. The mere observation of things doesnt satisfy him: he wants to possess things and even to coincide with them. His inclination to imitate has its origin in this tendency to possess and thats why he designs what he sees, why he describes his experiences and why he communicates them to others. Man wants to become what he is not, and he does so out of a dissatisfaction that he feels when being on his own, and out of the deep awareness that there must be something more apart from the ego: however he seems to find some pleasure in the enlargement of his own self, man has to recognise that he cannot deny the poverty of his individuality. In fact, also the latter tendency of his, originates in the awareness of his mortality: the awareness that his life, one day, will take an end, while all other things just will go on this awareness provokes the heavy longing that directs him towards all other things. Aware of its temporality, a living being nevertheless does not want to be left, and so it takes hold of everything and of each one in existence. Man tries to make alliances with others, as if, in doing so, it were possible to grab them in an indissoluble manner, while foreign things always look more certain than ones own self. Man funds societies that will survive the very limited individual lifetime and he invests the very best of himself in it, as if, in this way, he could assure the continuation of his personal life after death: he funds families, cities, nations. The individual transmits and transforms himself by the means of his investigations in some work that may be significant to others and in this way he hopes to make part of these others when he will be gone himself physically. Man yet also other living beings tries to break out of his own skin, and so he dislocates himself, he moves in all directions as if, in this way, it were possible to cover more place and space than just a body can do. The body expands itself over a territory and, even still further, it tries to get a sphere of influence, concerning not only the actual presence but also the potential one: the omnipresence as a real possibility, perhaps the threatening.
In his book, Het dualistisch en complementair karakter van schepping en evolutie (Moregem 1961-Universa, Wetteren 1964), Flanders great mathematician, René Coppitters, compares the particle-facet and the wave-facet in quantum-mechanics to the physical presence, respectively the sphere of influence of a man, e.g. a tax controller. The man cannot be present but in one place at a time which is his particle-facet yet everyone knows that, absolutely unexpectedly, he could enter everywhere which is his wave-facet, his influence. Spheres of influence are immaterial, alike mere possibilities are, yet their effect on the material world is often much more pregnant than is the effect of all other material things. The immaterial laws which form the constitution of a nation, direct the behaviour of all citizens and the fully immaterial threatening of punishments and morals mostly suffices to keep this going on. Knowledge obtained during learning processes directs our working life in its smallest details. The absolute invisible and the absent direct the behaviour of the material world in general. And all these effects, tangible or not, make part of a network of links that we cant overview since ages of time a network used by (human) beings aiming to connect themselves to others, aiming to expand their own influence, aiming to a oneness with the All and, in this way, trying to prevent to get lost when suddenly the day of farewell will be there. The most immaterial, unreal, which is at once probably the most prominent of all these influences, perhaps is death.
In his theory of evolution, Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) writes about the process of an expanding spiritualization that is going on since the origin of Creation which nowadays still goes on. Out of the dead material, subject to entropy in a universe principally condemned to death by the increasing of warmth, life raises and, in spite of the laws of entropy, life seems to be neg-entropic and of an ever growing complexity. By the expansion of cephalisation, humanity develops and human cooperation gives way to ethics and to the possibility of the transforming of the entire human into a seat for the divine. While natural laws originally tend to the maximisation of chaos, some counter-force called life organises all material things and, out of this organisation spring awareness, consciousness and self-consciousness. Body and mind relate to each other alike the subatomic particle relates to its (immaterial, spiritual) wave.
It looks as if the material aspect of the world continuously decreases in volume and it does so in favour of the spiritual which in its turn coaches the material, educates it and transforms it into more spiritual levels. One can see that in these continuous processes, the higher things manage the lower ones: the mind governs the body and the wave governs the particle alike the conductor of an orchestra directs his musicians who, in their turn, manage their instruments. Now, if death is indeed the most immaterial and simultaneously the most influential factor in our existence, than, at least in the perspective now opened to us, death for sure is comparable to the wave-facet of the subatomic particle and to the spiritual side of man.
As a matter of fact, death is not a being a human alike. Yet, alike body and soul are related to each other, life and death are as well. As the soul, nevertheless being immaterial and invisible, for sure is not just nothing in the same way death may be incomparably much more than the mere absence of life. For one has to consider well that the non-being preceding our life, is in no way comparable to the no-more-being of a life after death came in the play. For to say that, after his death, a man will have been alive signifies something totally different from the saying that he just is not. The being as well as the non-being cannot function as a (relevant) attribute unless it is placed in relation to a being that first has to exist. It is definitely of no sense at all to say that all what is not, is not, while, on the contrary, it is very significant to say that things that once have been, do no longer exist. These considerations are no games of language at all: death, as the not being alive any more or as the will no more being alive of a being that has lived once definitely is linked to that being and it needs that being in order to be able to exist.
On the contrary, the opposite seems not to be the case: it seems that death is superfluous and that it is even an obstacle for life. But dont we make a mistake here? Do we not make exactly the same failure of thought ascribed to the materialist of the seventeenth century when the latter states that (the belief in God and in the existence of) the soul in fact is an obstacle to the happiness and the pleasure of the physical human being? Once more: we need to consider that in fact nothing else has such an influence on our life than does this immaterial being of death. In this perspective we would even be willing to think that, in a certain sense, death is just the spirit of life.
17-03-2007
§9. Hope and meaning
§9. Hope and meaning
The attentive reader will have remarked well that in the latter paragraph the cited verse from the book of Wisdom tends to be put upside down: the book of Wisdom says that the mortal body is a weight for the soul, yet some materialists state that God and the soul are not just superfluous in order to declare life but, moreover, they state that they are awkward for the happiness and the pleasure of man: the soul is a weight for the mortal body that is in fact what they state. Remember e.g. eighteen-century atheists linked to the court of Frederik the Great, having no other aims than making themselves indispensable to that court by the soothing of the conscience of that king by the means of a learned form of flattery of secular excesses.
In the course of history, the despair mentioned above is being grasped more often as an excuse for less holy kinds of madness which principally can be controlled and even can be avoided. After all, it is not the case that the abyss of despair one can be seduced to while being faced with death, would miss an opponent. Imagine, e.g., a situation that faces a man with the lost of his beloved one supposed that in this case true love is in the play: undoubtedly a counterforce will manifest itself in the heart of the concerned one rather than in his mind, and this will more specifically concern a persevering rejection of the belief in the death of the beloved one mentioned. It must be added here that this force is strictly distinguished from the spiritual weakness which obstructs the acceptance of reality in adult individuals. As in the latter case confrontation with facts is being hindered, and as the concerned one flights into pretexts fundamentally neglecting death and the loss, the confrontation with death will be accepted as soon as the protest of love manifests itself, and it will do so in a continuous struggling. Probably you know the beautiful poem by the Russian poet Konstantin Simonov, in German translation entitled: Erwarte mich: Wait for me. The poet dies and he requests his beloved ones not to make the mistake that many others make as they believe that the one who died no longer exists. He requests them not to choose for the resignation and just to wait faithfully. Then you will see, so he says: if you persevere in the waiting, then, one day, I will come back. Indeed, it is essentially impossible for the one who loves, to resign. Not a resignation in the fact of the physical death is in question here, but rather the resignation in the curtailment and the finishing of love that essentially does not accept limitations of that kind. Of course this is madness for them who only adore reason, yet we know that the madman cannot be characterized more accurately than as the one who hasnt but his reason. The choice between the mad third symphony by Mahler and the barren reasoning of the rationalist shall be made very quickly.
The same holds concerning the choice between the belief in love and the belief in death. For, eventually, death is something to believe in or not, and parexcellence murderers do believe in death. In the course of times, countless people have been killed for the sake of truth, but they couldnt but be killed because their murderers did believe in death. On the other hand, we can still testify daily that these innocents did not die each time when others did not believe in their death. These innocent killed people did come back, and their number has been multiplied. They in fact arent death at all: they got a status still above the status of life itself, while they became heroes. Heroism is a reality by virtue of the belief in life which represents love. The belief in death can never reach this.
As a consequence, the very first novel in history of western literature is not accidentally a novel about heroes an epic. In El Ingenioso Caballero Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra (1547-1616), the hero fights against the proverbial windmills. The sympathy we all feel towards the hero rests on his recognizability, while the certain fact of his eventual defeat is the fate for all mortals. In his brilliant essay, God is dreaming you: Narrative as Imitatio Dei in Miguel de Unamuno(Janushead 7-2; appeared also in Portulaan, nrs. 89 and 90 [2007]), the prominent Romanian-American philosopher, Costica Bradatan, engages in this subject, more specifically in the light of the tragedy of human mortality. More specifically, Bradatan inquires the Don Quijote-approach by Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864-1936) as the latter raises the authenticity of the Don Quijote-character above the one of its author. As is well-known, in his novel, entitled: Niebla, Unamuno makes a literary tour de force: he stages a conversation between the author Unamuno in person and a character of his novel that is being condemned to death. Congruent with George Berkeley his philosophical idea that our existence depends on the fact whether God is dreaming or thinking us and referring to the concept of Wille by Schopenhauer and to the concept of Maya in Indian philosophy, in that conversation the mentioned character makes its author aware of the fact that he as well isnt but a character in a novel by God: if God just stops dreaming us, were gone. For our being has no fundament on its own; at its best, we are fictions; we integrally depend from our author who is our Creator. Nevertheless, Bradatan interprets this fact in an uttermost positive way: the significance and the salvation of our being lays in the solace that, in the footprints of our Creator, we in our turn are able to dream and to produce stories.
16-03-2007
§8. Despair and madness
§8. Despair and madness
Paradox, koan, riddle and death: they seem to belong to the same kind and in negligence one could easily think death to be a koan. Yet one innumerable difference is in the play: paradox and koan are riddles to thought; death on the contrary is a riddle with an existential dimension.
Properly spoken, the expression existential riddle is a contradictio in terminis: it gives us the illusion as if existential problems could ever being solved or at least treated in a significant way by thought. By the way, the same remark can be made concerning the expression existential problem: a problem from the Greek verb pro-ballein, which means: to throw out in front of ones self is something one is related to, or is able to relate himself to, from distance, which means: without coinciding with it. The actual change of climate, e.g., can be called a problem; ones disease can be called a problem; being short of time is a problem. In all of these cases we indeed are involved in the things considered, nevertheless our involvement is not that close that we couldnt take distance from the problem as such in order to watch it and to investigate it.
Now one could say that it is nevertheless possible to look upon death from a distance. For we are able to try to postpone our life-end by adapting a healthy and cautious way of living; we can quicken our own painful death; we can consider, prevent or question someone others death. And indeed it is possible to consider death to be a problem, as well as we can consider illness and shortness of time to be a problem. Yet, different from all the things mentioned, death is also more than just a problem. For concerning death there is no justifiable hope that we ever could overcome it. The problem of death does not give way to any doubt about the fact that it concerns an unmistakable, obvious and inevitable own end of each living being especially of human life, that is our own. There is just not one justifiable hope that one of the living beings ever could overcome its own temporality or its death, just considering the fact that one day the sun will extinct. As a consequence, the one who considers death to be a problem factually faces absolute despair.
Nowhere despair is as clear as it is in the light of death. And this despair, being unbearable for consciousness, makes that we transgress the borderline and that we suddenly start to believe: not only do we believe that there will be life after death but, moreover as it is the case in Christianity we believe that this renewed life, opposite to the actual life, was eternal and indestructible.
Considered in a rational way, one can never deny that the awareness mentioned the absolute despair remits man in a state of holy madness. It is clearly madness, yet this madness is holy as well, which means: inviolable. No sane man will blame someone other because of this madness, for each empathic human being is very well consent of the unfathomable abyss of this madness. Because death is bottomless this means: ab-surd. Or do we make a mistake here, and is it only looking as if this were the case? Is our very perspective deceiving us in this matter? So, let us consider well what the case is.
Principally each living being is reproducing itself, or tries to do so. As a matter of fact, it does not do so because it would have knowledge of its temporality and while, simultaneously, it would care for the survival of its species on earth. On the contrary, it does so out of a holy madness which originates in absolute despair.
Worms, butterflies, rats, birds and fishes do not reflect as humans do, but they nevertheless can feel, and also their feeling is a kind of knowledge. We know that thought is in fact a feeling canalised by the cerebral cortex and having its origin in the cerebellum, where the true animal-related awareness is situated. So to speak, our cerebral cortex is a socially induced braking mechanism upon the cerebellum a mechanism that has to improve social communication. Without a cerebral cortex we indeed would be dumb in the sense of unable to communicate properly, but this however would not imply a total unawareness. On the contrary, it is acceptable to presume that the dropping out of the sophisticated brain-parts would even stimulate the rough awareness mentioned.
Different case-studies illustrate this statement: they show how the extinction of certain parts of the brain is being accompanied by the phenomenon that other parts, which might have been neglected before, start to function more intensively from that very moment on. After lobotomy, patients involved may start developing specific faculties. Cases are well-known of people missing artistic potentials, yet developing astonishing graphical talents after lobotomy. In between, clinical experience learns that in cases of aphasia, characterised by the inability to find the right words, mind itself seems to remain, albeit in a very special way. Analogously, one can presume that the extinction of the cerebral cortex does not take away awareness: the core of awareness is just being dislocated to the rougher sphere of more basic feelings.
All this has been said just in order to explain that the awareness of ones own existence and, consequently, also the awareness of ones own individual temporality, as well as the awareness of the ubiquitous danger threatening life constantly, probably is being known by all of the living creatures, rather than by just human beings alone, as some have pretended for a much too long period in the past. Animals react on threatening dangers, and even plants do so: individuals of a well-defined kind of a tree that are being threatened by parasites, communicate this danger to other individuals of the same species, located many hundred of miles away from the first ones, and they do so by the means of self-made molecules that are being transported by the wind. The latter react to these signals by the enlargement of the protecting thorns that they wear on their limbs. Each amateur of vineyards who endures the patience to study the growth of these plants carefully, can see how the limbs are scanning their environment in all directions until they get support, and how they go on in this way all the time. If, in doing so, they arrived at a place much too dark, they seem to be aware of this, and they go back and try another route. Everyone can see how the smallest of all animals show reactions of anxiousness when being startled: cats, dogs, rats, fishes, birds and even ants get in panic and go on the flight when life-threatening changes appear in their environment. How ever could these precise reactions manifest themselves if these beings could not feel fear, and consequently if they did not have awareness of the fact that their life was being threatened? As a matter of fact they do not think as humans do in normal circumstances, yet one ought to be blind and deaf when daring to believe that they couldnt at least feel their existence, and be aware, in one way or another, of the fact that their existence is unique and evanescent.
Would it be one bridge to far when supposing that all living beings were aware of their own existence and of the temporality of their being? Would it be truly exaggerated when accepting that each living being knew what fear for death meant, and even so had awareness of the bottomless despair and the holy madness mentioned before? We do not state that animals are religious beings, yet we do determine that fear, panic and also the instigation to sexual intercourse is the characteristic of all of the living beings. At its own time, the instigation for coupling takes possession of all breathing and moving creatures, and it does so, not out of some reasonable decision and care, but out of a holy madness that is somehow familiar to fear, combativeness and panic. In fact, this holy madness, which eventually guarantees procreation, is an irrational but simultaneously very effective response of life faced to death. In this holy madness, the problem of individual death is being taken very seriously, in the sense that in this way one really takes care of it by loosing ones self in it, in perfect accordance with the fact that one can never keep distance from it. One has to plunge and to engage in it, to undergo it, not only in its brains but until the smallest fibres of his body. Exactly as it is happening in the holy madness of faith, humans do not accuse one another for the getting lost in these blind impulses that in fact have uncertain and unpredictable consequences. Humans do forgive one another for these kinds of holy madness because, once again, we are all aware of the abyss of despair, which means: we all can experience and forefeel it this despair in which the awareness of our own mortality makes us participate.
15-03-2007
§7. The mortal body is a weight to the soul
§7. The mortal body is a weight to the soul
A paradox works as does a koan which is a riddle originating from the wisdom of the East a riddle that Zen-masters give to their adepts to meditate on. The aim of the koan is that a meditation on it would bring the pupil to transcendent the usual thinking and even thought itself. Its technique factually is quite simple: in se, the riddle is unsolvable; this makes that it tires out the mind involved that heavy, that one in the end gives up his attempts; the riddle is being left aside, unless the pupil succeeds in putting it into a brand new perspective.
The interchange of perspectives and, more specifically, its broadening, is also in western psychology a phenomenon of great importance, especially in pedagogy. Concerning her study of metaphor, and in describing the development of abstract thinking, Barbara Léondar gives the example of a child learning the concept of mother: at the very beginning of its development, the child only recognises its own mother, who means everything to it and who is most unique. Only from the very moment on that the child gets notion of the fact that most other children have a mother on their own, it also gets the ability to grasp the concept of mother.
Analogously, people do not get aware of their own language until their contacts with others speaking other languages: the people from Old Greece named their enemies at war just barbaroi or barbarians which means: people who babble, and still nowadays, arrogance seduces us sometimes to identify others speaking other languages with just analphabetics.
In this way, the concept of the self doesnt come into existence but by the confrontation with the self of others, for egoism is not been overcome unless it is being known, which means that the insight in the fact that the (own) ego is not unique is necessary to it. The monkey that, for the first time, sees his mirror-image in a pool of water, does not understand what it is seeing unless it sees another monkey looking at its own reflection.
Each perspective has to give way to a broader one if it wants to get knowledge of its own limitations and to try to transcend them. E.g. nationalism illustrates the pitiful inability to relativize ones own being born and to become conscious of it. Solipsism is a philosophical tendency originating from conceptions which fail analogously. Also rationalism is not safe for this critique: it is raison going astray and behaving alike the snake that catches its own tail. Scientism is a specific form of the latter: in there, a scientific method is being considered to be the absolute source of knowledge. Some people want to express everything in the form of numbers, into statistic curves, in formulas or just in language, nevertheless daily life teaches us that language, however it is necessary, often fails in the expressing of essential matters.
In other terms, perspectives are necessary for our understanding of things, yet at once they are only well-defined perspectives. The making absolute of whatever perspective on things which we often name a conviction, an ideology or a belief is essentially tragic: it breaks down the understanding that it originally was meant to stimulate.
In fact, the mistake pointed at in here is familiar to the one mentioned by Saint Augustine and adapted by Karl Marx: it switches the means and the ends. The means (the ego, science, language, the given perspective etceteras) is being taken for the aim and, as a consequence, the aim disappears from the perspective. This can happen quite quickly, while the aim factually has its immaterial character in common with love, faithfulness, beauty, goodness, truth and so on. However these so-called abstract things eventually are the only things which do really matter, the inability to grasp them by the mind, causes the tragic relapse on the means. The one who has lost his own being, throws oneself as a madman in the insatiable tendency to possess and his penalty consists in the fact that, in his turn, he is being possessed by his own possessions.
One cannot be deliberated from the tragic evolution described here only in brief unless the pattern itself that is hijacking him is being broken through or at least is being interrupted. Concerning thought, nothing is more beneficial than the continuous changing of perspectives, nevertheless the danger to take for absolute even this latter method, is still there, for in that case we are facing relativism, and so, the good is being thrown away together with the bad.
Let us use the example from above a second time: the relativist is similar to the child recovering that other children do have a mother as well; moreover the relativist believes that, from this fact, the conclusion can be drawn that his mother is not as valuable as he had thought first. As a matter of fact, this absolutely wrong conclusion springs from the pity insolvency to bring the mentioned process of learning the process concerning the understanding of abstractions to a good end. In this very case, the necessity to leave the former perspective has traumatised the pupil badly and, in a kind of resentful egocentrism, he in fact rejects the learning-process that should be the result of it: albeit that he accepts a higher perspective he doesnt do so without mistrusting it thoroughly, while he blames its temporary and non-absolute character. In this way, the relativist essentially is a disillusioned absolutist; he feels harmed while not have found the absolute where he did expect it to be. While having the same roots, both relativism and absolutism can be reduced to the same evil.
In here, it is about the necessity of perspectives which offer possibilities, while they simultaneously have to be transcended in order not to fall flat in contra-productivity. Now, the human perspective par excellence is that of his corporality. It is useful and valuable and it also remains valuable, but it is also clear that it cannot be an absolute one. And probably it is in this context that we must understand the words from the book of Wisdom:
Corpus quod corrumpitur,
aggravat animam:
The mortal body
is a weight for the soul.
07-03-2007
§6. Life as a gift
§6. Life as a gift
The subject of our issue concerns much more than what has been presented here until now: the strange paradox of the identity, in the sense of the being of ones own self essentially is sinister and only in this sinister way it touches the core of our self. The thing that we consider so firmly and with so much certainty as to be the ego, or the self e.g.: remember the great French philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes, who considered the awareness of the being of ones self to be the very starting-point for his whole further thought (Je pense, donc je suis, i.e.: I am thinking, so I am ) this self in fact is at once the being of not ones self; it is the being of everything possible except ones self.
Philosophers express it in many ways: blood is thicker than water. And they all get trapped in the experience of the awareness of the ego because it seems overwhelmingly direct and certain. Yet the certainty of the ego is one of a very special kind. Opposite to what one should suppose, it is a very conditional certainty. The raison why we choose the ego or the self to be the foundation of all of our thoughts lays in the simple fact that the doubt about the ego would imply the absolute uncertainty about just everything concerning our thought, our knowledge, our experiences and our being. In other words: we accept the ego as an absolute certainty because we simply cannot permit the slightest doubt about it if we nevertheless did doubt, we would shrink in an absolute and irreversible chaos. In still other terms: if we want to escape from hell (for remember: is a greater horror thinkable than a situation of absolute uncertainty in the lack of each support?), we are obliged to grasp existence (nevertheless it happens to us apart from our own free will) with both of our hands, and to attach to it, to make it to our most intimate possession. This at once means that, in this way escaping from the mentioned horror, we make an alliance with our existence an alliance of the highest thinkable intensity: for in doing so, we link our own destiny to the destiny of a life that originally is not ours. And now follows a crucial and not harmless step the reader now has been warned.
Considering that, out of a pregnant need, we did link our own destiny to the life that principally is strange to us a life that we did not elicit, want or choose, and that in fact is not ours until the moment that we take possession of it after which this life seems to become ours and it does so in the amount that we do take possession of it considering this all, we factually yet did accept the supposition of a self apart from this life. If we were not supposing this, then we could never say that we did identify us with a life which is not ours. Yet, totally unjustly we did make the supposition of an existence, of a self, apart from the life that we factually do live. Now, out of this consideration cannot but follow one single conclusion: the self springs fully from the paradoxical happening mentioned here as being the life that we factually do live.
The reader will understand for now that the self which is the inevitable origin and the necessarily support for all of our actions is not possible in any other way than under the condition mentioned: the self really comes into existence in a happening constituted by the fact that the thing which is totally strange, suddenly transforms to the most intimate of all things. It is a characteristic of the being of the self that the self cannot be otherwise than as the strangest and the most intimate thing simultaneously. The self does not have any choice about itself, because the making of a choice presupposes a distance that is not there and that will never be there, while, on the one hand, the most intimate thing or the thing indicated by this very concept and, on the other hand, the thing indicated as the strangest thing, suddenly coincide. The distance between what is most strange and what is most intimate has collapsed and does not exist any longer it belongs to a past that, moreover, only happens into our own minds. The I am simultaneously is an I am not; the I am myself simultaneously is an I am not myself; the identity simultaneously is its own negation. In stating that these paradoxical necessary conditions are the necessary conditions for the existence of the self, factually means that the existence isnt but possible in a way of a being and a not being that coincide with each other.
As an immediate consequence of this consideration, we know that by no means a person is able to detach himself from the responsibility for his own existence, while this would mean the detachment from ones own self: already the idea of taking distance from ones own existence is as absurd as is the conceitedness pretending that one should be able to take distance from his own pain. Because pain is by definition the thing we coincide with, we cannot deny our own physical pain; analogously we cannot detach ourselves from our self. (Physical) pain is the experience of the coincidence of our being with something from which we cannot separate ourselves by definition; analogously, the experience of the self is the awareness of a responsibility or a debt which we cannot escape while we coincide with it; while we ourselves are identical with this debt. The self is a debt; the identity is a debt. And for that reason, the self is a being and a not-being simultaneously; something which is there, while it is not really existing. Our self or our being has the character of a debt that has to be redeemed, and by this very necessity it is a fact that our existence cannot manifest itself but by the means of an activity, a restlessness, a being unfinished, an incompleteness, a matter that must be paid of. We now must remark and this might be important that in our reasoning we did not depart from the statement that our existence were identical with a being in debt of, for the latter is rather the inevitable conclusion of our reasoning. It is so at least if we do not want to loose the being of our self, whatever this might be.
Perhaps we now may synthesise what proceeds, by the next terms: our existence is being given to us, and it has a specific character, which includes that it does not allow us to reject it, however, at the same time, it is not just ours. We get it, we take it in possession however we cannot do this in the real sense and perhaps who knows? we are even not allowed to do so and, in this way, we relate to our own existence in the same way as does a man who got something on loan and who wants to keep it, nevertheless bringing up: Allow me to possess what you gave to me, I will pay it back to you! So we put ourselves in debt as we took in possession something that factually is not ours. As a consequence, our being inevitably will be a being in debt. In doing so, we behave alike a man who got something undeserved, not being able to receive it for the reason that he was not able to be grateful. For the ability to be grateful is the condition to the ability to receive some undeserved gift. After all: who tells us that we have to pay or to deserve the gift of our life? And how ever could we be able to pay our existence than by giving it back? Yet could this ever be the intention of our Creator? So, if we made a mistake in this or be it an unwillingness rather than a failure then it is clear, once again, that the origin of this mistake exists of the inability to be grateful. Perhaps our existence is just a struggling to come in tune with the gift. Yet why must there still be death! Moreover: is the presupposition of an eternal life not a much too easy answer in the sense of a condition added up here in order to make this reasoning sound?
But now we have to remember and to realise well that our existence has the character of a gift, and that, factually, we turn out to be unable to comprehend, to grasp and to confirm this gift. Now suppose that we were able to do so, that we were able to grasp our life as a gift, gratefully: what then would keep us away from believing that it could be given to us a second time? For the existence of a life after death, being an issue for prophets, charlatans, philosophers, theologians or still others such a life after death if it is allowed to express it in this way would eventually in no way be more miraculous than the very existence that proceeds death.
"Allí me mostrarías
aquello que mi alma pretendía, y luego me darías allí tú, vida mía, aquello que me diste el otro día:"
"El aspirar del aire, el canto de la dulce filomena, el soto y su donaire, en la noche serena, con llama que consume y no da pena."
Over there, You would give to me the life that You did give me once You would give it to me another time at once: thus wrote San Juan de la Cruz in the year 1578. Here we placed the 37th and the 38th verse of his Canciones entre el Alma y el Esposo. The Esposo the Beloved One represents of course the divine Bridegroom. In his own comments, San Juan cites the verse 9:15 from the Book of Wisdom:
Corpus quod corrumpitur,
aggravit animam:
The mortal body
is a weight to the soul
06-03-2007
§5. Our life is not ours
§5. Our life is not ours
Before starting our exposition about death, we must realise well that life itself, in which we feel home in a certain sense and that we often call ours, in fact is a strange thing to ourselves. We have to make this remark in order not to become a victim of pitiful simplifications originating from the unjust placement in opposition of each other of life and death. But let us firstly explain what we do mean by saying that life is not just ours and that in fact it is strange to ourselves.
Let us take the example of the physical activity of the seeing. When I look up, when I see something, I say that Im seeing. The proposition: Im seeing this or that, makes it appear as if to see were an activity performed by ourselves, by our own acting. (Take notion of the fact that what we are saying here concerning the seeing, fits as well concerning the rest of our activities, like the hearing, the smelling etc.) In the statement: Im seeing something, the expression requires an active subject being someone performing the action, and this subjective activity is more or less being supposed to be executed as a consequence of again a subjective act of the will. It deserves attention to look at this more carefully for one moment, and to ask oneself the question in what sense, and also in what measure, the name activity or subjective activity can be ascribed to this happening that we call the seeing. For it is obvious that the seeing, about which we believe that it is our own seeing each time that we believe that we indeed are seeing, is not something that is self-evidently being brought under the control of our will. Even more: the fact that the seeing, on the one or on the other occasion, is being subjected to our will, is at last an exception rather than the rule!
I want to see something, I look up, I watch and Im seeing it this is what we would call the normal course of matters. But do we give attention to the fact that this normal course of matters factually supposes many necessary conditions in order to make possible the phenomenon of seeing as such? I will see nothing if it is dark, if the battery of my lamp is empty, if mist is coming up, if my eyelids stick, if someone blinds me with a spotlight or if I lost the sight because of blindness. And as a matter of fact I will be seeing nothing at all if Im no longer alive. And let us now ask this question: in what sense and measure do we have control over the mentioned circumstances and conditions which in fact are countless in number and which admit the normal situation to exist? Isnt it true that these conditions and circumstances which are really necessary for our sight, are mostly being given to us? And that, consequently, they also can be lacking? And, if this is the case indeed: in what sense do we have the right to go on in believing that our sight is ours and that it is us, watching, as we are seeing?
As a matter of fact: in our attempt to make clear the problem demonstrated, our language is playing an important role; our language seduces us to rely on it - which means: to accept that it just should coincide with spirit. Alike the (cultural) world seduces us to believe that it coincides with the real world of natural things. Considering then the statement: Im watching, we seem to be hypnotised by common sense and we factually link the significance of this predicate to an active subject that, so to speak, would hold its sight into its own hands. Yet in fact, in these, it is all about a process of seeing, and the subject that sees, is just being involved in it. It is true that in the absence of any subject, no seeing is possible; nevertheless, out of this truth one can certainly not conclude that this subject would produce its seeing out of itself. There is no heritage without an inheritor, but in no way the inheritor is producing the heritage that he is inheriting. There is no present in the absence of the one who has to receive it, but this does not mean that the receiver should be the producer of his present. The power of the receiver does not reach any further than in his possibility to accept, to refuse or to destroy what is being offered to him. The obvious human inability to reflect thoroughly upon the fact that all what he believes to do and to be is in fact something that has been given to him, just illustrates our fundamental ingratitude.
All what has been said here about our seeing, as a matter of fact also holds concerning all of our other activities and ways of being; it holds concerning our whole life. The life that we believe to be ours, is just a process in which we may participate, it is something that we just receive, and our power over our own life does not go further than goes our possibility either to accept or to reject it partially, or as a whole. In the latter case which occurs most frequently we require conditions to the life that we receive and, in doing so, we tend to submit conditions to our very own received life. In fact we swing around in this form of rejection from the very moment that we believe that the received life was ours. If then, suddenly, one or more of the many necessary conditions supporting one or more of the activities occupied unjustly by ourselves, appears to be lacking, we may feel as if we were treated unjustly. The sadness originating from the loss of possibilities we expected to be present an expectation grounded in the unthankful perception of matters is being caused exclusively by our own ungratefulness. To express this in a very simple way, we then behave alike a man looking in the beak of a received horse. As at least a proverb in Dutch says, we should never do that.
All this has been said in order to remember that a consideration of death as a loss of life, factually asks a modified and a strongly nuanced approach. In these, it is not about a loss of something that we once did possess at the utmost it is about the loss of something we believed to possess. In fact, life has never been someones possession and it will never be. Alike, the proposition: Im seeing, probably could find a more truthful expression in the next: Im participating to sight. We better shouldnt say that we are living, but rather that we may participate to life. We receive one day and, after this, a second one, and one more and, in this way we probably receive an amount of twenty-thousand days. It is possible that we react ungratefully to this and that we get used to these daily presents: we may come to believe that we deserve these presents, and that injustice is done to us if one day these friendly gifts just stay away.
05-03-2007
§4. About the unity of the body and the soul
§4. About the unity of the body and the soul
Todays world could seduce us to make dangerous comparisons. Already Saint-Augustine said that people, while constructing their own world by the means of basic, natural material, tend to make a specific failure concerning their view on reality as a whole. It concerns a failure that rests on an unjust inductive reasoning. This failure originates from the fact that we tend to assume that, similar to our constructed world, also nature, out of which we recruit the material to build our world, should be nothing more than another construction. Admitted on the one hand that it is possible to consider nature as if it were a construction, and that engineers factually cannot consider it otherwise while it is their duty to submit the forces of nature to mans will as to realise his deepest aspirations we, on the other hand, must experience repetitively that this construction of nature, time after time, turns out to be very different from what we believed it to be, and it also seems to be much more complex than we had thought before. And this experience warns us not to take our knowledge for an absolute one: we have to stay aware of the fact that our ideas about nature are just provisional creations by ourselves and that these ideas will never loose their provisional character. While constructing the world, we consider nature as our example: we build up our world similar to the wonderful example that is nature to us, tending to consider God as a kind of a super-engineer and, in this way, our constructing activity makes us feel a little divine. Nevertheless, the ennobling effect ascribed so frequently to human work can never result from any similarity with the divinity: the concerned analogy reduces the divine to human proportions rather than it should deify man.
This remark is not just a game with words: in the illusion of any deification of ones self by the means of ones work, the divinity is being reduced just to be a worker and an engineer, and nature is being reduced to a mere construction. Yet no one of us, made of flesh and bones, is able to create flesh or bones. We cannot create any breath of life, any spirit or any living being. Man just makes material constructions. When ever working with living material, our activity is limited to the process of trial and error concerning those mechanisms in life which are subdued to the mechanics of lifeless matter. In this way, man can produce tools that, in their turn, can ameliorate the reach and the efficiency of his actions. Mans tools are a kind of lengthening-pieces of his hands, his body and his mind, but without the body and the mind they cannot function as they do not have any autonomy; they do not have any functionality on their own. Mans tools borrow their meaning and their whole being integrally and exclusively from man himself: without man they have not the slightest utility, and so it is excluded definitely that one ever could ascribe some intrinsic value to these objects, which means that they can never exist apart from man and on their own.
An analogy between man and society has been applied more often in the course of the history of man inquiring the being of his own identity: as we all know, billions of cells constitute the unity of the human body thanks to the specific laws of nature which keep them together, which keep them all functional, which keep them alive. As a consequence of this, we spontaneously tend to compare the body with society that has its citizens as its own specialised cells which stay functional thanks to the existence of social laws. Sometimes, this analogy is being made that far that some of us ascribe to society a kind of a spirit, an identity even so strongly that one could easily think that its value were superior to the value of the human persons which, in that very case, are being identified with the mere citizens. E.g. in certain forms of communism this failure is being made very often, but also all those kinds of systems which are being subdued to entities even much more difficult to identify, such as an uncontrolled free market-system. In contemporary Western societies, welfare is often being identified blindly with well-being, often representing nothing else but an economy which is going well, in the mere sense of just fast. As if the quality of our life and our happiness ever could depend on velocity, and more specifically: on the velocity of economical changes. This evil only suggests that Western people are often people on the flight, for it is only in this very situation than one can get advantage from the speed characterising his movements. Apart from this, it would be much more natural to identify happiness with rest, which we all tend to do spontaneously. It is true that one can find some sound analogies between man and society, as he can find them as well in comparing the world of the atoms to the world of the stars countless analogies of that kind are thinkable. We just want to say that thought in terms of analogies is in fact an old and a primitive modus of thought: it has certainly its own qualities if applied well, yet it can also mislead us badly; and it has never been an easy task to overcome the inertia of thought. In comparing the human being to a society, we may never forget that the unity of a man is not in an exhaustive way comparable with the unity of a society. Alike man is not comparable exhaustively with a machine, a computer or an animal. It is often due to the mentioned inertia, laziness or superficiality that there is given way to misconceptions; yet we can become their victims quite easily.
One of those dangerous analogies manifesting themselves more often in the minds of certain writers, concerns the so-called mind-body-problem. For more and more one tends to use the analogy between, on the one hand, the body and the mind and, on the other hand, the hard-ware and the soft-ware, i.e.: the computer (or: the infrastructure, the internet) and its content. This much to easy comparisons quickly lead to conclusions concerning human existence which consider the human body to be the carrier of its mental content, and in which the human body is being considered as being fully replaceable and the stuff that it carries were no longer some personal soul or identity, but rather some kind of a common good which can be described as a principally immortal culture. In the human considering of himself by the turning of the considering of one of his own products, one makes the same mistake of induction against which Saint Augustine did warn sixteen hundred years ago. In the course of history this failure pervaded thought in a broad rank of various forms and it kept on in doing so until today. What makes the mentioned way of considering so special, is the interplay of some factors which ask our attention for just one moment.
The new technologies have appeared very suddenly: they are the fruits of the work of skilled and specialised people who, in their turn are standing on the shoulders of giants, as poets expressed it giants who never before reached so high above us all. At the same time, new technology never before manifested itself in such a quickly, visible and user-friendly way for the benefit of almost all layers of the populations of the whole world. The knowledge and the skills required for the conduction of a motorised vehicle means literally nothing compared to the skills required for the development and the production of it, and this is still truer concerning the most recent of technologies. And so we now can observe that not only the new technology is being sold easily: we also swallow some ideas that seem to accompaign the mere material products, e.g. the idea that this technology would be that superb that probably life itself could take an example to it. And this remembers us of a story in the Old Testament, telling us about the potter ad his clay: You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, "He did not make me"? Can the pot say of the potter, "He knows nothing"? ( Isaiah 29:15-17).
In brief: the idea that the mind-body-problem could be resolved, or at least that it could be explained thoroughly by the means of the perspective of the newest technology, is very misleading: it tends to make us believe that some clear solution for the very mystery of our existence would be on its way. In fact, in this way we do not make the slightest progress on the contrary, for this mentality only weakens our vigilance.
Ironically enough the mentioned new concept of man implicitly refers to an outdistanced and old-fashioned concept, holding that the body and the mind would be separable from each other. Yet man is made of one single piece, while only in the world of our conceptions, man can be divided up into a body and a soul. Analogously, we can speak about the matter and the form of a concrete thing, knowing very well that those two components are mere concepts: we will never find them in reality, simply because they cannot exist on their own i.e.: autonomously and separated from each other. The body-length has no existence apart from the body that is being measured, as already Plato did remark, and in no way one can ask himself earnestly what it is that makes someones body longer than the body of some other person: is it because of the head, or is it because of the legs? In the same way, space and time do never appear separately, at least not in the real world, while nevertheless we still need both of the concepts in order to be able to describe our (real) experiences. In though, we divide the unity of the being, we break it up into pieces, exactly in the same way that we break up nature into pieces in order to build our world by the means of them.
But nature has not been built up out of pieces: nature is a unity and we ourselves make part of it which makes this unity principally unknowable in an exhaustive way. Now, exactly the same happens concerning our language by the means of which we have to describe and to represent reality which in fact is our thought. Our language is being built up out of its own elements, which we call words, numbers, and more things like that; yet those elements do not have a vast place in the real world which they try to describe, because, as the first of all poets, Heraclites, said: everything is flowing. The spirit, building up itself in language, is alike the world which we try to build up out of stones and other materials. But our world is not identical to nature as such, out of which it recruits its building-stones. In the same way, our thought our language is not identical to spirit. Nature and the spirit stand apart from the world and language respectively, and it looks alike this gap between both of them will always remain: the world will never become nature the most splendid cities with gardens and acres disappear as soon as we stop to maintain and to cultivate them, while nature just remains what it is. In the same way, language and though in general will never approach the spirit out of which they recruit their ideas by the means of our dreams. The insight that comes out of our dreams precedes its formulation that, in its turn, stagnates, freezes and becomes stone as soon as it is being pronounced or written down. And this is the fate of all thoughts from the moment on that they are being expressed, written down and embedded by the framework of ratio which is identical for all of us. The raison why Old Greek civilisation adored ratio lays in the fact that, opposite to our dreams, ratio is identical for all of mankind. Yet simultaneously this characteristic of ratio is its own most tragic restriction. For the dream, once concretised and expressed in a specific idea, has become a dead dream, and the death of our dreams is the price they have to pay in order to be reborn in our common world. For that raison the (personal) dream is eternal, and the idea, the ratio that we all have in common, is temporarily it has to be refreshed regularly, it has to return at vast times to the dream out of which it originates in order to resource; it has to die in order to be able to stay alive. And in this way it does not differ from man himself, for ones individual life must die if at least human existence wants to survive.
04-03-2007
§3. Death as a deus ex machina
§3. Death as a deus ex machina
If our story would end at this point, one could ask for the criterion to make the difference between the faithful one and the fatalist the latter being the unbeliever who nevertheless believes in love, assenting at once the amor fati the love for the fate a tragic concept used by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. For what would distinct the former from the somehow arrogant acquiescence as we can find it in Spinoza: the acquiescence that is being told to arise from those matters that are necessary, irrevocable and fatal? In fact, this resignation gives only a deceitful rest, while it is being based on the principally absolute recognizability of reality.
This love towards the fate has the fate as its object: it isnt true love while it isnt something person-directed; in fact its a distorted and hidden form of ego-directed love, which eventually signifies the following statement: If I do not get what I wish, I will accept this fact in the way of a specific love for this specific misfortune! But this means a resignation in misfortune, simultaneously hiding a continuous rejection of it a discrepancy that never can be taken away and that seduces us to accept it as something in which one could find an ultimate solace, an opportunity to make ourselves invisible something in which we could shelter for the brutality of existence as if it would admit us to hold ourselves for dead in this way. The amor fati unjustly dwells in the illusion of a death that factually is not there. In that very case, man unjustly longs for death and for nothingness as an ultimate solace which would free him from all responsibility and from the heavy weight of his existence. Man makes himself blind for this fatal miscalculationjust by denying it and by laying the responsibility for what is going wrong in the hands of the nothingness! Although it is a fact that only persons are able to bear responsibility: ideas, imaginations and other products by man cannot do so notwithstanding the fact that we sometimes wish this so badly.
In this way we come to a conclusion that has some severe implications: the problem that bothers us is not death, it is rather the absence of death, and the disenchanting fact that alas it cannot exist, that it is a complicated illusion, a deus ex machina that we perform much too easily into our own minds, in order to find some way to escape from the heaviness that is pressing on our deeper thought a thought that is bearing an consciousness which is actually unbearable: the awareness of guilt.
The point we arrived at will be significant in a crucial way for the totality of our issue. For here arises the extremely important question, asking which of both of the following things is more real: either matter or guilt? This in fact is the question asking for the ground of the being itself, and it shows itself in a more abstract form in the problem interrogating the relationship between ethics and ontology. Already since Augustine of Hippo, and in fact from still earlier periods in history namely since Plotinos evil has been said to have no ground of being at all: only the good exists, so says Augustine; the evil isnt but a lack of the good; it is an emptiness, and so it is not a real being. Saint Paul, writing in his famous letter that nothing ever can have sense in the absence of love, factually expresses this particular relationship between ontology and ethics, which is the relationship between the being and the good. More specifically he shows that in the absence of the good, no being is able to stand and no life is worth to be lived any longer. Especially Judas suicide is an exponent of this tragic reality and almost it is a dramatic proof for the truth of Saint Pauls evocation.
The fact that we can think about a life no longer worth to be lived which would be a life that would be no longer capable to free itself from its guilt or a life that has lost hope for a deliberation from it brings into our mind in an impressive way the fact that the physical or the biological life does not rest on itself: it is in no way autonomous, it needs a benediction originating from a reality that stands above the material world. To be clear: by this world we do not mean some reality that would be situated above that what is evidently present to us in a direct way: on the contrary it is all about real things, things that are certainly true and that are totally inherent to all that is present to us. A person living the life that is being given to him, knows very well that his life is not his own in an unconditional way. When considered purely theoretically, he indeed may speak for his physical integrity; yet at last he has to consider that this integrity will be of no signification if it is not being founded by something more substantially. Persons stand by no other means than by their reciprocal recognition; by the denying of this reality, a person should deprive himself from his own ground. In other terms: as human beings, we cannot neglect the very duty of reciprocal recognition without losing our personality itself. The urgent character of this duty creates the specific guilt that is inherent to principally every person. This is a debt that no one ever is able to redeem, because it is a task for life.
Out of this idea and almost spontaneously, the following question is rising: if, indeed and as we could remark here, a physical life apart from true existence is a thinkable possibility, then could we not turn this statement upside down and ask ourselves why a true existence apart from physical life shouldnt be possible? Expressed by an analogy: we can consider that a coat, as soon as it cannot dress any body any longer, stops to be a meaningful dressing-tool which means that it just ends up to be a coat. Yet on the contrary we can also consider that a body deprived from its coat still remains a body. Without bodies that can be dressed, the existence of coats is just impossible, because coats get their own meaning and being from the bodies they must dress. Apparently, the opposite is not the case: a body undressed just continues to be a body. The coat borrows its being from the body, but the inverse is not true: without its coat, a body is still a body. In the same way, a physical being deprived from any true existence is thinkable, but it is also meaningless; and so we tend to believe that life needs a true existence while the opposite of this statement is untrue. So the question rises whether someone could give one single raison why a true existence apart from physical life couldnt be a real possibility?
03-03-2007
§2. Love gets the ultimate satisfaction from its own being.
§2. Love gets the ultimate satisfaction from its own being.
The question whether there is a life after death is as paradoxical and as unsolvable as is the question whether God is able to create a stone that heavy that He is not able to lift it. Yet Christianity answers both the questions affirmatively: God is able to share his power and to ameliorate it in one and the same movement or decision and, analogously, life can die and simultaneously it can be transformed into eternal life.
Let us first consider the example mentioned: God hands a piece of his power to his human creatures, yet exactly this act is able to illustrate that He is much more powerful than we initially tended to believe. For, initially, we identified power with just muscle-power, while there exist many other kinds of power apart from just this one. We believed to be dealing with a paradoxical situation because we did not reflect about the possibility of higher forms of power. It wasnt but on the very moment of our being confronted with an army of soldiers not forced by the whip, that we took notice of this reality. What causes them to follow their leader? so we did ask ourselves: how do they manage when there is no whip in the whole scene? Without success we chased for the hidden forces that made these soldiers fight.
He who believes in Me, will live forever, although he has died thus says the Christ. Again, and without success either, we search the dead body for the hidden life as we stand in front of a disciple, someone who did give away his life for the sake of the Christ. Indeed, we are being confronted with disciples, and we do so despite the fact that they obviously die like everyone else does. So, where is the eternal life? Where is that hidden reward? we ask ourselves. For also in this case, we think about things familiar to our thoughts, about something that could be seen, touched, and taken home by us in order to beware this precious thing from all dangers.
Though, eternal life is fidelity alike fidelity that makes fight soldiers even in the absence of any reward: it is just an invisible thing. Probably, the visible things have to belong to the things of a lower level; that what, on the contrary, has real value, has to escape from that visibility, and this is a very lucky matter of fact. For suppose for one moment that the valuable were something that could be seen and taken, the pieces of money and gold alike that we need in this world to buy the daily bread: one quick grasping of a thief would suffice to take it all away from us! So, we understand that the real valuable must be kept bewared from theft, lies, mockery, death and so on. If eternal life was visible and made of the dust, it were a prey to death, and so it just couldnt be eternal life any longer.
The fidelity that makes soldiers fighting in the battlefield doesnt need any further reward. The devoted one understands that his devotion is the most supreme of all of his values: when it lacks, everything lacks, and the fighting looses its ultimate sense. In the same way, the Almighty God must know that forced disciples would be just lifeless instruments or robots. The Almighty undoubtedly prefers the total powerlessness above some kitschy glory. Such a glory in vane can probably be ascribed to worldly kings, yet certainly not to the Creator of the universe. Therefore, eternal life cannot be just a continuation of this physical life on earth; neither can it be some re-edition of it. Eternal life is not in the need of other pictures and expressions apart from the evident testimony of the one who conquers death by the gift of his own life for the sake of love. In order to exist, it doesnt need something else, for love has its satisfaction from its own being.
02-03-2007
§1. The âkoanâ: the paradox as a springboard.
§1. The koan: the paradox as a springboard.
Is there life after death? The question arises until it annoys us. It is often that terrible that many ones, while just hearing about that question, run away, deciding never to come back.
I could agree with them: one must not ask questions of the kind that no one is able to answer. The question whether there is a life after death, indeed is a question of that kind. Alike the question whether God, being almighty, is able to create a stone that heavy that He is never able to lift it.
If God is able to create a stone of that kind and He has to be, as He is almighty it will be a consequence at once that He will be unable to lift it. So what about his almightiness? For in this case one asks whether the Almighty is able to deprive Himself from his own power.
Now, dont be astonished: in Christianity this question is being answered affirmatively! For by his own free decision, the Almighty principally is unable to deprive man from his freedom. God did create us in his own image, after his likeness, as the book of Genesis says, and this means: as a free being, as a being that is able to choose and, more accurately: as a being that is able to choose between good and evil.
No one can deny it: in Christianity, the Creator has handed over a bit if his might to his human creatures. Yet, his ability to do so isnt but paradoxical from a too narrow perspective on things. For this paradox is being annihilated by a second one. This second paradox consists of the fact that God does not diminish his power by leaving a piece of it into mans hands. On the contrary: his power is being increased by this very act of generosity!
How can this be the case? thus one could ask. And at this point I may invite you to ask yourself the question which of both of the following gods is the most powerful:
Our first god creates human beings who do not have a free will; they behave exactly as He wants them to behave: they worship Him and they only do what is good. They cannot sin as He does not make them sin. He just imposes his law to them, and they respond it in a most accurate way.
Our second god, on the contrary, creates human beings able to choose themselves between good and evil. For sure, they have full knowledge of the divine law that asks them to do the good and to stay away from the evil, yet they posses the freedom to respond the divine law as they wish. So, under these human beings of the second kind, there probably will be some who obey their Creator.
You already have foreseen the question that arises from this dilemma, and that sounds like this: which one of both the gods is the most powerful: will it be the god whose creatures are being forced to obey him, or will it rather be the god whose creatures are able to follow him by their own free choice? Which one of both the army generals is the best one: is it the one who has to force his soldiers to fight, or is it rather the one whose soldiers do follow him spontaneously to the battlefield? At least it can be said that the latter one has soldiers much more brave than has the former one. And soldiers fighting voluntary are soldiers whose wishes are identical with the wishes of their leader. The creatures of a forcing god do follow their god just because they cannot act otherwise, while probably it could be the case that they wished otherwise.
The forcing god who, in fact, is a dictator, needs a forcing system in order to be able to assure himself of the obedience of his creatures: he will be in the need of controlling systems, of all kind of laws and punishments, and of an economy with a monetary system and more things like that. Yet the other kind of god doesnt need all this, for his creatures do obey him out of free choice. And we all know that someones might increases as his needs diminish
As a matter of fact, one could throw up that the latter god the one who forces his creatures in the end is not necessarily obeyed by all of his people. Theoretically it is even possible that, in the end, just none of his creatures will obey him. It is not unthinkable that even all of his creatures eventually will prefer to reject Him and to do it their own way. Considering this possibility what about his being almighty!?
I will not run away from this objection, for it is a realistic one probably it is a more realistic one than we tend to accept. On the other hand it must be said that at least in Christianity the not-forcing God has at least one true and faithful adept, who accordingly is being called Son of God. In this way, the Christ in fact is the one who is proving the statement that the non-forcing God is the most powerful of both the gods proposed in here, and that, in this way, He turns out to be the only possible God. In doing so, the Christ just protects the Creator from the ultimate failure of his plan, for a God who has at least one follower on base of his own free choice, is more powerful than a god who has to force his legions to obey him. Perhaps, the not-forcing God must have thought that, anyway, nothing ever could have sense apart from love... And only the obeisance on the base of free choice testifies of true love.
The question whether God is able to create a stone of the kind He cannot lift, is being answered affirmatively in Christianity. Though, this answer does not imply this divine art to be a sign of Gods weakness. On the contrary: the power speaking from this very answer belongs to a higher level than the level of the muscle-power we were thinking about spontaneously at the beginning of this story. And this only means that our initial question was arising due to a lack of knowledge. In asking the question, we wrongly did believe it could never be answered; yet at the moment each difficulty has disappeared: we just mistook the problem.
In asking the question whether there is a life after death, it appears that we tend to make an analogue mistake. Departing from what we believe to know, we also do believe that no one will ever be able to answer this question in a sound way. We might think that we make a trap for the one to whom we are asking the very question. Yet, also in this case, there is no trap at all: it is just our ignorance that is bothering us. So this is at least what we pretend to be the case: we just need a thought-framework that is broad enough to give us a perspective not determined by just things on the level of the muscle-power. For sure we may not ignore the muscle-power, but at the same time let us remember that there are many more kinds of power in heaven and on earth.
